[Context: this was for a Solstice themed around physical and intellectual frontiers that humanity has faced; this speech addresses the scientific frontier.]
[Editor’s Note: I am somewhat confused as to the actual title of this piece]
I grew up as an atheist surrounded by a Christian family, and reading Dawkins as a teenager was my first exposure to secular worldviews independent of my own. My best friend, in high school, gave me copies of The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, and I remember sneaking them into my backpack and reading at home under my covers. Life is much better now that I’ve got a community of other secular people with whom to share ideas, but I’m still pretty fond of those formational memories. I want to share with you all some stories I learned from one of Dawkins’ books, Unweaving the Rainbow.
The title Unweaving the Rainbow comes from a poem by Keats, in which Keats complains about Newton’s discovery that light splits into a spectrum. Here’s Keats:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philósophy will clíp an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow.
Keats did not appreciate scientists going around and ruining the mysterious; he prefers the state of ignorance, thinking it to be aesthetically prettier. In fact, Keats turned this whole notion into a philosophy, saying for example:
What quality [goes] to form a Man of Achievement in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously [is] “Negative Capability,” that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any “irritable” reaching after fact & reason.
I don’t suspect Keats’ position would be popular among this community. I’ll let Richard Feynman handle this one for us. Keats complains about the “mere” touch of cold philosophy, but Feynman responds:
Nothing is “mere.” Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars— “mere” globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it! For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
On another occasion, Feynman says:
The beauty that is there for the poet is also available for the scientist, too. But the scientist sees a deeper beauty that isn’t so readily available to others. The complicated interactions of the flower. The color of the flower is red. Does the fact that the plant has color mean that it evolved to attract insects? This adds a further question. Can insects see color? Do insects have an aesthetic sense? And so on. I don’t see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds.
But I’m not here to wax poetic about why science is beautiful, much though I enjoy quoting Feynman. Blindly revering science is just as bad as blindly revering the mysterious. The reason why humans have been exploring the scientific frontier throughout our history, the reason why we study science, is because science is useful.
Even that simple discovery by Newton, the splitting of light, was useful. Here’s one thing that came of it. In 1814, the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer discovered that there are certain dark features, absorption lines, in the spectrum of sunlight. Later, others discovered that these dark lines correspond exactly to absorption lines we observe in the spectra of elements like hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Nowadays, the position of these lines for each element are accurately predicted by quantum mechanics.
Before this discovery, we could have had no hope of rigorously studying the chemical composition of faraway stars. In 1835, in fact, one natural philosopher rashly wrote:
We shall never be able to study, by any method, the stars’ chemical composition or their mineralogical structure. Our positive knowledge of stars is necessarily limited to their geometric and mechanical phenomena.
I’ll conclude by quoting to you from Unweaving the Rainbow:
Today, by meticulous analysis of Fraunhofer lines in starlight, we know in great detail what the stars are made of. Modern instruments spectacularly outperform Newton’s prism, but today’s science of spectroscopy is the direct descendant of Newton’s unweaving of the rainbow.
We can tell in great detail which chemical substances are present in a star, as well as its temperature, pressure and size; thanks to other techniques in astronomy, we can also detect features such as orbiting planets.
By unweaving starlight in spectroscopes we know that stars are nuclear furnaces, fusing helium out of the hydrogen that dominates their mass; then thrusting helium nuclei together in the further cascade of impurities which make up most of the rest of the elements, forging the medium-sized atoms of which we are eventually made.
We now invite everyone who is attending to come up to the altar and light a candle. The candles represent the frontiers that we have explored and the frontiers that are open to us to explore. While you light candles we’ll be playing a video of footage from the International Space Station, which is both a reminder of what humanity has accomplished so far and a reminder of all that we haven’t accomplished yet.
Nor ever yet
The melting rainbow’s vernal-tinctur’d hues
To me have shone so pleasing, as when first
The hand of science pointed out the path
In which the sun-beams gleaming from the west
Fall on the wat’ry cloud, whose darksome veil
Involves the orient, and that trickling show’r
Piercing thro’ every crystalline convex
Of clust’ring dew-drops to their flight oppos’d,
Recoil at length where concave all behind
Th’internal surface of each glassy orb
Repells their forward passage into air;
That thence direct they seek the radiant goal
From which their course began; and as they strike
In diff’rent lines the gazer’s obvious eye,
Assume a diff’rent lustre, thro’ the brede
Of colours changing from the splendid rose
To the pale violet’s dejected hue.
– Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744)
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